Turning a blind eye on hunger: humanitarian data systems under pressure

Autor*in:	Holger Mann
Datum:	5. Dezember 2025

When I started working on the Global Hunger Index (GHI) last year, one thing became immediately clear: the Index – and humanitarian action more broadly – stands or falls with the data behind it. This year, some of the most important systems that generate those data are being dismantled or severely disrupted.

Against this backdrop, the 2025 GHI shows that global hunger has barely declined since 2016. That stagnation would be worrying enough on its own. What worries me even more is that it coincides with the weakening of the tools that once told us where hunger is rising and why.

Severe funding cuts are hitting key parts of the global data system. We are now entering an age of “invisible hunger,” in which need persists but the world loses or ignores the evidence to act.

The Collapse of a Data Backbone

One of the clearest examples of this unraveling is the fate of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program. In February 2025, amid major cuts to U.S. foreign aid, USAID funding for the program came to an end. For four decades, the DHS has quietly provided much of the statistical backbone of global health and nutrition monitoring: more than 400 nationally representative surveys in over 90 low- and middle-income countries, used to track child malnutrition, maternal health, fertility, access to water and sanitation, and other population indicators (Khaki et al. 2025; Lenharo 2025).

The importance of this data becomes even clearer when you look at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – a set of global targets for human development and sustainability adopted by all UN Member States. DHS data feeds into 39 indicators across the SDG framework, including five under Goal 2: Zero Hunger (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2025).

With the ending of USAID support, many DHS activities have been paused or scaled back. Interim funding from other donors now keeps the website as well as data services online and allows some planned surveys to go ahead, but the program’s longer-term future remains uncertain.

The implications for the GHI are profound. Its scores depend on four indicators — prevalence of undernourishment, child mortality, child stunting and child wasting— with the latter two being most directly affected. The full impact of this and other funding cuts on all four indicators is still unclear.

The Ripple Effect on Hunger Tracking

Funding cuts have not only disturbed the ability to track hunger retrospectively, but to forecast hotspots. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) – long regarded as a gold-standard early-warning system – was suspended in early 2025 and has resumed operations in a reduced form, after a single report in May and a gradual restart from late June (Mersie 2025a; Simons 2025).

Data inputs from other agencies that FEWS NET depends on are also being cut, further reducing its coverage. These include satellite imagery and climate data from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As a result, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which draws on FEWS NET analyses alongside national data and partner assessments, has been forced to delay or scale back several country classifications. Together, these disruptions weaken one of the main global systems for detecting where food crises are emerging and how severe they are likely to become. (Mersie 2025b; Mersie 2025c)

This is not only a technical problem; it is a systemic one. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) warns in its recent report “The State of Open Humanitarian Data 2025” that we may already have passed the “high-water mark” of data availability, with “data about people and how a crisis is affecting them” at the highest risk of disappearing. These are exactly the kinds of data – on acute malnutrition, food security status, displacement, and access to basic services – that humanitarians use to prioritize needs, allocate resources, and justify appeals to donors. Yet as donors increasingly focus on cutting costs, narrowing their priorities, and demonstrating efficiency, these decisions are being made on a thinner evidence base, with far less clarity about who and what is being left out.

When that qualitative and early-warning layer frays, needs that cannot be documented are easily treated as needs that do not exist. UN OCHA has estimated that around 79 million people who had previously been planned to receive life-saving humanitarian assistance would no longer be targeted for support in 2025 because of funding cuts and the hyper-prioritization of response plans (UN OCHA 2025).  At the same time, global nutrition experts warn that recent aid cuts could deprive about 2.3 million children of treatment for severe wasting and lead to roughly 369,000 additional child deaths each year (Osendarp et al. 2025). In summary, these decisions are shrinking not only the services that keep people alive, but also the data infrastructure that makes their needs visible.

Rebuilding the basics: towards country-led data systems and shared sovereignty

Taken together, these developments raise the question of how we can rebuild the foundations of our data systems not just to restore what has been lost, but to make them more resilient to future shocks. A recent concept note from the World Health Organization on reimagining population-based health surveys and the Medellin Framework for Action on Data for Sustainable Development both call for transforming data systems from external platforms to long-term national data ecosystems.

That vision is compelling, but it also sits uneasily with the reality that data is not a neutral technical input; it is a tool of power. In recent crises, hunger and food security statistics have been manipulated or suppressed, and independent IPC analyses have been delayed or sidelined in ways that blur the reality of famine on the ground (Masri et al. 2024; Abdelaziz et al. 2024b). In Gaza, for example, an online campaign funded by the Israeli government has sought to counter an IPC famine declaration with paid ads portraying “normal” food availability (O’Donovan & Lee 2025). At the same time, large technology companies have amplified hate or bowed to political pressure with grave consequences for vulnerable groups, as documented in the case of Meta’s role in anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar (Amnesty International 2023). In the United States, federal agencies have quietly dismantled or scrubbed public data on hunger and on LGBTQ+ health (Davis & Hayes 2025; Steenhuysen & Hesson 2025). Country-led data systems and data sovereignty therefore need not only more investment, but also strong safeguards against censorship, manipulation and disinformation.

Governments, donors, humanitarian organizations and private companies that act as data sovereigns all need to align around common ethical standards, so that the data they collect is treated as a global and national public good – transparently governed, protecting vulnerable populations and supporting sustainable development. While these proposals are a vital part of a new system, lack of national commitment is and will be a reality in many contexts. Supporting data systems and estimation methods that can help fill these data gaps beyond individual countries therefore also need to be strengthened (UN OCHA 2025; Hodkinson 2025).

Conclusion: refusing to go blind by choice

When I first started working on the Global Hunger Index, I expected the hard part to be the analysis itself: choosing indicators, checking assumptions, bringing a complex reality into a single score. Over the past year, I have learned that a deeper struggle now sits beneath that work: the struggle to keep the basic facts about hunger measurable at all. The near-termination of the DHS Program, the temporary shutdown and scaling back of FEWS NET, the delays and disruptions in IPC analyses, and the broader contraction in humanitarian data documented by UN OCHA all point in the same direction: at the very moment when hunger is stalling or worsening, the systems we use to see it are being weakened or withdrawn. Closing down surveys, early-warning systems and humanitarian data platforms is a political decision, not an accident. So is investing in their renewal.

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Holger Mann is a research associate at the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) at Ruhr University Bochum. His work focuses on statistical modelling in the areas of health, food security and disaster risk analysis, including contributions to global assessments such as the Global Hunger Index and the WorldRiskReport.